I remember those days when Python was yet to be accepted as a mainstream language. I wanted to use it, but I was writing software for our clients, who would deploy my code on 10,000 Unix boxes. This is back when an estate like that was a huge and unwieldy thing to manage. There was simply no way that our customers were going to roll out and commit to maintaining a whole new runtime across their estate just for me (where "me" is "my project"). So our realistic choices were Perl or compiled code. Nowadays Python has become a "normal" language and no-one bats an eyelid when I list it as a prereq. Took, all told, maybe 7-8 years from when I first thought "Python can give me a serious productivity boost relative to C" to that point.
I have used Ocaml "for real" and I am still getting up to speed on Haskell (I love it!), but this time, I can skip all the struggle for acceptance. I can just ship 'em a binary. Is the type system going to give me as big a boost in real productivity (incl. debugging and support overheads) as Python did over C? Well we shall see...
I still dont see how much of this has anything to do with dynamic vs. static. You seem to primarily be addressing off topic points which have nothing to do with why do you choose dynamic over static.
What are your reasons for choosing a dynamic language?
And my answer was, to get a productivity boost over C. At the time, there was no strongly-typed language that it was feasible to use that offered as much leverage. Now there is, and one of the reasons for that is the new crop of functional type-inferred languages that "play nicely" with existing estates by deploying as compiled code (native, or .NET, or JVM).
Very few people have the luxury of coding in a vacuum. Language choice is very rarely a purely technical one.
It wasn't my question. My question could be boiled down to... so as you spent most of your time talking about things that have nothing to do with dynamic vs. static, i take it that they aren't really relevant to you. You said no. But you answer still seems to have little do with static vs dynamic but about more concrete comparisons that seem to be, at best, orthogonal to the question at hand.
Ermm, it was, it's right there on the page! I answered in great depth, explaining that "dynamic vs static" (again your words) is in fact a question with many variables.
Perhaps you meant to ask about "weakly vs strongly" typed?
I remember those days when Python was yet to be accepted as a mainstream language. I wanted to use it, but I was writing software for our clients, who would deploy my code on 10,000 Unix boxes. This is back when an estate like that was a huge and unwieldy thing to manage. There was simply no way that our customers were going to roll out and commit to maintaining a whole new runtime across their estate just for me (where "me" is "my project"). So our realistic choices were Perl or compiled code. Nowadays Python has become a "normal" language and no-one bats an eyelid when I list it as a prereq. Took, all told, maybe 7-8 years from when I first thought "Python can give me a serious productivity boost relative to C" to that point.
I have used Ocaml "for real" and I am still getting up to speed on Haskell (I love it!), but this time, I can skip all the struggle for acceptance. I can just ship 'em a binary. Is the type system going to give me as big a boost in real productivity (incl. debugging and support overheads) as Python did over C? Well we shall see...